


Mirrors

by CrumblingAsh



Series: Fragile Things [11]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Bruce Feels, Darcy Feels, F/M, Flash Fic, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Post-Avengers (2012)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-05
Updated: 2013-12-05
Packaged: 2018-01-03 13:28:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1071012
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CrumblingAsh/pseuds/CrumblingAsh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Darcy knows what scares Bruce.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mirrors

* * *

 

She knows what scares him.

Darcy never took a psychology course in college. Her teenage years had been filled with the technical terms and medical labels psychology books preached like Truth – excuses to hide behind and reasons to be buried, and she had found sociology, with its turn-table labeling of _society,_ to be much more sickeningly satisfying. So, while she knows the technical terms and theories of what scares society about him, she doesn’t know the same about what scares _him_ about him.

She doesn’t have to.

She sees it in the way he folds in on himself when he’s angry, the way his fingers will curl into the belt loops of his pants as his fists form tightly in rage, restrained. She hears it in the way he speaks of the Hulk, the Other Guy, the _monster_. In his lectures of temper and anger and calm. Feels it in the way he holds her after her nightmares, tense and uncertain, avoiding her scars – careful around her after, timid and gentle and ready to leave at one word.

She knows what scares him, and she knows she will never be able to convince him how irrational it is, how impossible, because she’s never been able to convince herself of the same.

If she lets him hold her a little tighter when he wakes up instead of her, eyes green and breaths short – if she makes jokes about Green Giant vegetables and pokes him until he laughs at them – if she refuses to scream in the face of the Hulk (even though he’s bigger than her, raging, out of control), forces herself to talk to him – if she snuggles into his side after missions despite stiff, almost unwelcoming arms –

(if one night she says into his neck, crying and shaking and _fucking hating it, damn it_ , _it was years ago, Lewis, get over it_ , that she wishes he had been there, that the Hulk had been there, that she trusts them)

\- well, blankets are softer to hit than bones, and that’s just what she does.


End file.
